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I missed this a few weeks ago, but it’s a story on Jason Botterill from the Saint John paper. It focus mostly on Nick Petersen and Simon Despres. It’s a good read.

Petersen is obviously a good player at the junior level. His stats bear that out without question. But I don’t remember him standing out in a significant way in training camp last fall. Plus, his numbers look a lot like Joey Haddad’s, and Haddad didn’t get a whole lot of AHL time this season. I think Petersen has potential, but the jury is definitely still out on him.

@Blackblood: I don’t know why the Penguins didn’t make signing Nathan Moon a priority, but the kid’s numbers progressively got worse in juniors. That can’t possibly be a good sign, can it?

Now, this Mattias Modig thing is completely out of left field. With Marc-Andre Fleury, Brent Johnson, John Curry, Brad Thiessen and Patrick Killeen all signed for next season, I didn’t expect the Penguins to be in the market for a goaltender. Is one of those goalies going to get moved? Is Modig going to stay in Sweden for another year? (I think his new Swedish team, Brynas, would prefer that.) I have yet to make sense of it.

The general consensus seems to be that the Flyers should do their celebrating now, since they’re running into a better team in the Stanley Cup finals and should bow out in five or six games. I tend to agree, generally speaking, as I am impressed with Chicago’s firepower — I’d probably pick Hawks in six, if you forced me to predict — but this line of thinking ignores one very important fact. No one loses in the Stanley Cup finals quite like Marian Hossa.

Anyway, one great reason to root for the Flyers: Joey Mullen survived the John Stevens coaching purge and is running the power play from the press box. You’ll never meet a nicer guy in hockey.

At the other end of the spectrum — I always got along with him, but I don’t think it would be accurate to call him a “nice guy” — who would have guessed that Dan Carcillo (pictured) would be the last ex-WBS Penguin playing professional hockey this season? Not me.

Big AHL game tomorrow night, with P.K. Subban arriving in time for a Game 7 between Hamilton and Texas. Subban is a dynamic player who can change a game from the blue line. For Texas, Jamie Benn has emerged as a future star. Doesn’t matter, though. Hershey will beat either team. The Bears have underachieved in the playoffs in a perverse sort of way — no team that good should have to pull off nine third-period comebacks to get to the Calder Cup finals — but it’s not like they’re going to lose now.

Not that anyone asked my opinion, but … I think trading Malkin would be a bad idea — you don’t deal away generational talents unless you have absolutely no choice — but I have a question. Is there a good reason Malkin couldn’t be moved to the wing permanently, whether alongside Sidney Crosby or Jordan Staal? Think about it. Malkin is bad in the faceoff circle and he’s nothing special defensively. The only reason to leave him in the middle is because that’s where he’s most comfortable. How about leaving him on the wing consistently for a few months and see if he gets over that? If it doesn’t work out, make a move for a winger at the trade deadline and shift Malkin back to the middle. Just a thought.

One last thought before I go. I was watching Card Sharks last night and a woman got a 9 and she couldn’t change the card. So she says, “I know it’s against the odds, but I’m going to say ‘Higher.’” Might have been the dumbest human being I’ve ever seen on television. She got an 8. Good.

The Penguins re-signed Deryk Engelland to a one-year contract extension Wednesday. It’s a two-way deal, paying him $500,000 when he’s in the NHL. AHL salaries aren’t immediately disclosed, but he’s probably due for a bit of a raise from the $75,000 he made last year. He had a pretty good season, going plus-10 with nine fighting majors.

There’s no downside to re-signing Engelland. He’ll struggle handling the puck at the NHL level, but he gives Pittsburgh a rugged option at the bottom end of its defense depth chart, an element they don’t have much of. He’s 28, so he’s an ideal seventh defenseman candidate. Given how the Martin Skoula experiment didn’t work out very well, maybe that spot will go to a homegrown guy this season.

I thought Engelland struggled in the playoffs, but I learned in off-the-record conversations that the Penguins thought his woes were tied directly to the fact that his D partner was playing poorly.

The contract status chart is updated below. Here is another chart for your entertainment, the WBS all-time penalty minute list.

– Missed this last week. Ex-Penguins defenseman and all-around good guy Trent Cull has landed on his feet as head coach of Sudbury of the OHL. Cull was shuffled out of Syracuse when the Crunch switched affiliations from Columbus to Anaheim.

– This is going to sound insane, but for a team rolling to an inevitable 11th Calder Cup, the Hershey Bears haven’t really impressed me so far in the playoffs. Of their 10 wins, seven were by one goal and five were in overtime. That’s barely squeaking by. They should be more like ‘93 Cape Breton.

– I heard some things about how Chris Chelios probably ended his career with a Game 7 turnover that led to Jamie Benn’s overtime winner for Texas last week. Then I watched the play. That characterization is very unfair to Chelios. He just pushed a puck up the wall. If Riley Holzapfel (No. 9) doesn’t lose a 1-on-1 battle with Benn, the goal never happens.

– Mike Therrien wants back in the NHL. If you’re a GM with a talented team that needs some structure and a kick in the pants, give him a call. Come to think of it, as the story says, Tampa might be a really good fit.

– This is a really interesting blog post about penalties in the NHL this season. Did you know Sidney Crosby led the league with 11 slashing minors? Or that Steve Downie was head and shoulders above the rest of the league in roughing calls? Check it out.

– Don’t mean to stop the captaincy discussion in the comments. Keep it going. My votes go to Nasreddine and Kostopoulos.

Some good points being made in the comments under the previous post about Pittsburgh’s playoff exit. Everyone likes to chime in with lessons learned when a team is eliminated like this, so I’ll throw my two cents in too.

Winning the Stanley Cup is hard.

It’s really hard.

When your best players aren’t your best players, you lose.

When you have absolutely no idea what kind of goaltending you’re going to get from game to game, you lose.

When you completely whiff at the trade deadline, you lose.

So many moving parts. So many things that can go awry. The Penguins will compete for a championship every year they can pencil 87 and 71 onto their lineup card, but this doesn’t look like a dynasty in the making anymore, does it? Too much parity in the salary cap era for that to happen.

I’m still not sure exactly what is making Montreal tick in these playoffs, how they’ve been able to knock off the two best teams in the East. I’m willing to bet Bruce Boudreau and Dan Bylsma have asked themselves that same question more than a few times lately too.

I know they played suffocating man-to-man defense below the circles, blocked shots like madmen and got outstanding goaltending from Jaroslav Halak.

I don’t know how Mike Cammalleri turned into Rocket Richard and Dominic Moore became Guy Carbonneau.

I guess that’s part of what makes playoff hockey so damned unpredictable. I mean, by tomorrow night at this time, the seventh-seeded Philadelphia Flyers could have home-ice advantage in the conference finals. Go figure.

On a personal note, I feel like I’ve really accomplished something in my goal of being an unbiased journalist. As I watch the Boston-Philadelphia series, I actually find myself rooting for the Flyers because of the incredible comeback story they’re on the verge of writing. If you knew me as a 16-year-old, in the days when I’d wear my Ulf Samuelsson or Darius Kasparaitis jersey to the Igloo, you’d realize how big a step that is.

Not that this is foremost in anyone’s mind, but I got a clarification on the free agent status of a couple of defensemen and I wanted to share. Ben Lovejoy is indeed a restricted free agent. Steve Wagner, on the other hand, is Group VI unrestricted.

You never know, at the start of a playoff run, which taxi squad player is going to jump in and make an impact. Two weeks ago, you could have easily guessed Pittsburgh would need Chris Conner’s speed, Eric Tangradi’s size, Nick Johnson’s skill or Ben Lovejoy’s skating at some point in this postseason. As it has turned out, it’s been Mark Letestu’s brains that were needed in the NHL club’s lineup.

Make no mistake, that’s why Letestu has been the man for the job in the Montreal series. On several occasions the past few years, Dan Bylsma and Todd Reirden have told me that Letestu is the smartest player on the ice at any given time. If they needed a player to explain systems to a teammate, Letestu would have been the one they’d choose.

For that reason, Bylsma feels comfortable writing Letestu’s name on the lineup card, even at this time of year. This NHL.com story does a good job of summing up his impact so far.

To me, the interesting part of the story is not that Bylsma trusts Letestu now. Many coaches would trust him at this point. It’s that Bylsma, and Todd Richards before him, kept giving Letestu AHL ice time, often on the power play, when he wasn’t doing anything with it as a rookie and even into last season. He didn’t develop overnight, and some organizations might have grown impatient.

Anyway, I counted it up, and I’ve covered 23 playoff series since I started doing this for a living. I’d like to think I’ve learned during that time that there’s a rhythm to a playoff series that you can discern if you look hard enough. In other words, you can tell when a tam’s done. When I was watching the Canadiens spilling off the bench to mob Jaroslav Halak in the middle of a raucous Bell Centre at the end of Game 4, I couldn’t help but get the impression I was seeing a team celebrate its last win of the season. At some point, the tank hits E and I think that’s where the Habs are now.

Of course, I could be completely wrong about that. I’m back from vacation now, so if I am wrong, feel free to let me know about it in the comment section. I’m filling in on the sports desk this week, so I should have a chance to do some blogging.

A winner of first-place honors in the blogging category of the 2012 Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors awards, Penguins Insider was created to give local hockey fans an interactive, in-depth way to follow the team they so passionately support. The blog's author, beat writer Jonathan Bombulie, has been covering the team since its inception in 1999. Contact him at jbombulie@aol.com

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